Remain separate

A native Spanish speaker should be consulted the next time the editors attempt to write Spanish in a headline. The headline about the recent American Jewish Committee survey, “Viva Latino Jews,” April 12, is not grammatically correct. “Viva” refers to just one person or one subject, not to a group. Also, the word is usually flanked by exclamation marks to express emotion.

Either way, in 1988, I conducted a similar survey for the AJC among Latin American Jewish immigrants of Jackson Heights, a neighborhood of the Borough of Queens, to see if there was a need to set up a community center for them.

The findings of the new survey discussed in the article agree with the findings of mine, but this time at a national scale: the Latin American Jewish community living in the US is highly educated and economically successful, and don’t identify themselves as “American.

They rather call themselves Argentinian, Colombian or any other nationality of the country they came from.

What the current survey doesn’t show is that the majority of those immigrants are of Ashkenazi background as many trace their roots to Poland, Russia and Germany. This is important because it dispels the myth that most Latin American Jews are Sephardim.

As Latino and a Jew, I was invited by the New Jersey chapter of the AJC to address a gathering of Latino journalists and community leaders and American-born Jews when I lived in that state.

Other than sharing non-kosher food and hearing how much each community has contributed to the US, nothing specific has come out of these gatherings.

Despite the AJC’s efforts to bridge the gap between Latinos and American Jews, the two communities remain separate because they have very little in common.

And now the organization is reaching out to Latino Jews, whom it believes “are well-positioned to help advance relations between Jewish and Latino communities.”

As a speaker at other Jewish organizations and as a journalist working for Latino and Jewish publications for several years, I realized that even though the relations between the two communities are somewhat friendly, they remain far apart, despite speaking Spanish and coming from Latin America.

One thing is the reality; the other is what the AJC wants it to be. DANIEL SANTACRUZ Ma’ale Adumim